NOTE: FOR SEVEN NUMBERS THIS NEWSLETTER
ON WHISTLEBLOWERS WAS PUBLISHED PERIODICALLY.
TODAY AND HENCEFORTH IT WILL BE PUBLISHED ON (AT PRESENT PROPOSED) NATIONAL WHISTLEBLOWER’S
DAY, JULY 30. SEE EXPLANATION BELOW.

“A people who mean to be their own
Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” James Madison.

OMNI’s endowed fund at UA’s Mullins
Library for the purchase of books and films on Victims includes books and films
on corporations and on resistance to US Imperialism Abroad and
Repression at Home—including whistleblowers
and investigative reporters, true heroes, true valor.

General Cartwright Reveals
Cybernet Warfare Against Iran

Pilger, Leakers vs. US Fascism

Amy Goodman Interviews Chris
Pyle, 1970s Whistleblower

Bunnatine Greenhouse: Iraqi Oil
Contracts Whistleblower

La Franiere, Crackdown on Leakers

Insider Threat Program: President
Obama’s Crackdown on Leakers

NWC
Requests that Obama and Congress Declare July 30th National Whistleblower Day

Official
Recognition Sought for Founding Fathers' Support of the First American
Whistleblowers of 1777

Washington, D.C. June 13, 2011.
Today, the National Whistleblowers Center
(NWC) issued acall-to-actionrequesting
that the President of the United
States and Congress declare July 30th as National
Whistleblower Day.

As set forth in today's op-ed piece by Stephen M. Kohn in theNew
York Times, "The Whistle-Blowers
of 1777,"ten
sailors and marines contacted the Continental Congress with allegations that
the Commander of the United States Navy had committed serious misconduct,
including the torture of British prisoners.

Instead of retaliating against the whistleblowers or
attempting to cover up the misconduct, America's Founding Fathers provided
material support to the whistleblowers, and enacted America's first ever whistleblower law on July 30,
1778.

Copies
of the original documents from the Continental Congress arereproduced here.

Stephen M. Kohn, Executive Director of the NWC, issued
the following statement:

On
July 30th, 1778, the Founding Fathers expressed unanimous
and strong support for whistleblowers in enacting America's first whistleblower
law. In a time of war, when the existence of the republic itself was at
stake, they did not hide behind ‘national security' to cover up embarrassing
facts about the first Commander of the U.S. Navy. Instead, they ensured
full public disclosure of the misconduct allegations, took prompt corrective
action, and they provided direct material assistance when the whistleblowers
appealed for help from retaliation.

Despite the severe financial strain of the budding republic,
Congress provided over $1,000 to ensure that the whistleblowers would have
the best legal assistance possible in defending their reputations and
freedoms from the retaliation they faced.

The Founding Fathers demonstrated the courage of their
convictions and established once and for all that exposing misconduct of the
highest-ranking government officials is at the heart of American democracy.

The contributions of modern day whistleblowers such as
Ernie Fitzgerald (billions in Department of Defense fraud); Bunnatine
"Bunny" Greenhouse (illegal no-bid contracts in Iraq); Sherron
Watkins, Cynthia Cooper, and Harry Markopolos (rampant fraud on Wall Street);
Bradley Birkenfeld (billions in fraud by UBS); Dr. Frederic Whitehurst (fraud
in forensic laboratories); Coleen Rowley, Jane Turner, and Sibel Edmonds (FBI
abuses) have been significant in the preservation of democracy. And the
list goes on. But unlike the Founding Fathers, our government has not
acknowledged the contributions of these patriots and heroes. Instead,
their contributions to the public interest have been officially censored.

A national day of recognition is essential to honor
both the courage of the Founding Fathers in 1777 and the continuing
contributions of Americans who have had the courage to, in the words of
America's first whistleblower law, ‘give the earliest information to Congress
or any other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds, or misdemeanors.'

Summary

Every single day, thousands of
American workers report fraud, violations of environmental rules, health and
safety hazards, and political corruption. When done right, whistleblowing has
strengthened democracy, protected the environment, and saved taxpayers and
investors from huge financial losses.

Now, from the world's leading
whistleblower attorney, comes the first-ever consumer guide to whistleblowing.
The Handbook sets forth twenty-one basic rules every potential whistleblower
needs to know. With The Whistleblower's Handbook, Stephen Martin Kohn has
become the first author to not only explain American laws regarding
whistleblowing, but also to provide a guide for how whistleblowers around the
world can protect themselves using the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

The Whistleblower's Handbook is
the authoritative reference for anyone who has ever wondered how they might
blow the whistle - and, once they've done so, how to prevail.

What's
New in the Third Edition?

The Third Edition is revised and updated through
February 2013. Included are new sections and updates on:

* The historic Birkenfeld $104
million dollar reward

* The newly enacted Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act

* Reward under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act

The Whistleblower's Handbookincludes a 20-page Q&A on the Dodd-Frank Act rewards
provisions. This section explains the SEC's regulations that went into effect
on August 11, 2011, and provides insights on how to maximize potential
rewards.

TheWhistleblower's Handbookalso explains how whistleblowers can
use the Dodd-Frank Act to blow the whistle on violations of the Foreign
Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). Readers learn how whistleblowers anywhere in
the world can now submit anonymous reward claims for reporting corruption of
local officials.

...ofwhistleblowerprotections held the
firstdayof a two-dayassembly to...protections for people
who...

Greenwald With a Look at the Next NSA Bombshell

By
Emma Roller, Slate Magazine, NRS, 30 June 13

lenn Greenwald previewed a
yet-to-be-published document about the National Security Agency surveillance
program during a speech at the Socialism 2013 Conference in Chicago on Friday night.

Speaking
via Skype (hence the blurry photo above), Greenwald said theGuardianis planning to publish a document
showing that new technology allows the
National Security Agency to direct one billion cell phone calls every day into
its data repositories.

"What we are really talking about
here is a globalized system that prevents any form of electronic communication
from taking place without its beings stored and monitored by the National Security
Agency," Greenwald told the liberal crowd. "It doesn't mean they're
listening to every call. It means they're storing every call and have the
capacity to listen to them at any time."

In his speech, Greenwald excoriated the press for criticizing former contractor Edward
Snowden's decision to leak the NSA documents, saying a climate of fear
permeates investigative journalism and cripples the mainstream reporters'
ability to speak truth to power.

“In their
minds, the only kinds of leaks that are bad are leaks that the government
doesn’t want disclosed to the public,” Greenwald said. “The only thing that is
journalism to them is when they carry forth the message that has been implanted
in their brains by the political officials whom they serve. And I think this
behavior highlights the true purpose of establishment journalism more
powerfully than anything I or anybody else have ever written.” . . . .

While the world focuses on Washington’s pursuit of NSA whistleblower
Ed Snowden, another much more high ranking member of the US power structure has
been indicted for espionage this week…

US General James Cartwright was regarded by Washington insiders as ‘Obama’s
General’, and now he’s facing prosecution for blowing the whistle on ‘Operation Olympic Games’ which planted the
Stuxnet and Flame viruses in Iranian nuclear facilities in order derail
Iran’s civilian nuclear program. At closer examination, it appears that
Cartwright’s revelations didn’t so much harm US
interests per say, but they hindered Israeli ambitions towards a war with Iran.

In
his book,Propaganda,
published in 1928, Edward Bernays wrote: "The conscious and intelligent
manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important
element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of
society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of
our country."

The
American nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays invented the term "public
relations" as a euphemism for state propaganda. He warned that an enduring
threat to the invisible government was the truth teller and an enlightened
public.

In
1971, whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leaked US government files known as The Pentagon Papers, revealing
that the invasion of Vietnam
was based on systematic lying. Four years later, Frank Church conducted
sensational hearings in the US Senate: one of the last flickers of American
democracy. These laid bare the full extent of the invisible government: the
domestic spying and subversion and warmongering by intelligence and "security"
agencies and the backing they received from big business and the media, both
conservative and liberal.

Speaking
about the National Security Agency (NSA), SenatorChurch said: "I know the capacity
that there is to make tyranny in America, and we must see to it that
this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the
law . . . so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which
there is no return."

On 11
June, following the revelations in The Guardian by NSA contractor Edward
Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg wrote that the US had now entered "that
abyss."

Snowden’s
revelation that Washington
has used Google, Facebook, Apple and other giants of consumer technology to spy
on almost everyone, is further evidence of a modern form of fascism - that is the "abyss." Having
nurtured old-fashioned fascists around the world - from Latin America to
Africa and Indonesia
- the genie has risen at home. Understanding this is as important as
understanding the criminal abuse of technology.

Fred Branfman, the antiwar activist who exposed the
"secret" destruction of tiny Laos by the US Air Force in the
1960s and '70s, provides an answer to those who still wonder how a liberal
African-American president, a professor of constitutional law, can command such lawlessness. "Under Mr. Obama," he wrote, "no
president has done more to create the infrastructure for a possible future
police state." Why? Because Obama, like George W Bush, understands that
his role is not to indulge those who voted for him but to expand "the most
powerful institution in the history of the world, one that has killed, wounded
or made homeless well over 20 million human beings, mostly civilians, since
1962." [See William Blum’s books.
–Dick]

In
the new American cyber power, only the revolving doors have changed. The
director of Google Ideas, Jared Cohen,
was adviser to Condaleeza Rice, the former secretary of state in the Bush
administration who lied that Saddam Hussein could attack the US with nuclear weapons. Cohen and
Google’s executive chairman, Eric
Schmidt - they met in the ruins of Iraq - have co-authored a book,The
New Digital Age, endorsed as visionary by the former CIA director
Michael Hayden and war criminals Henry Kissinger and Tony Blair. The authors
make no mention of the Prism spying
program, revealed by Edward Snowden, that provides the NSA access to all of us
who use Google.

Control and dominance are the two words that make sense of
this. These are exercised by political, economic and military designs, of which
mass surveillance is an essential part, but also by insinuating propaganda in
the public consciousness. This was Edward
Bernays’s point. His two most successful PR campaigns were convincing
Americans they should go to war in 1917 and persuading women to smoke in
public; cigarettes were "torches of freedom" that would hasten
women’s liberation.

It is
in popular culture that the fraudulent "ideal" of America as morally superior, a
"leader of the free world," has been most effective. Yet, even during
Hollywood’s
most jingoistic periods, there were exceptional films, like those of the exile
Stanley Kubrick and adventurous European films that would have US distributors.
These days, there is no Kubrick, no Strangelove, and the US market is almost closed to
foreign films.

When
I showed my own film,The War
on Democracy, to a major, liberally-minded US distributor, I was handed a
laundry list of changes required, to "ensure the movie is
acceptable." His memorable gesture to me was: "OK, maybe we
could drop in Sean Penn as narrator. Would that satisfy you?"
Lately, Katherine Bigelow’s torture-apologizingZero Dark Thirtyand Alex Gibney’sWe Steal Secrets, a cinematic
hatchet job on Julian Assange, were made with generous backing by Universal
Studios, whose parent company until recently was General Electric. GE
manufactures weapons, components for fighter aircraft and advance surveillance
technology. The company also has lucrative interests in "liberated" Iraq.

The
power of truth tellers like Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden
is that they dispel a whole mythology carefully constructed by the corporate
cinema, the corporate academy and the corporate media. WikiLeaks is
especially dangerous because it provides truth tellers with a means to get the
truth out. This was achieved byCollatoral
Murder, the cockpit video of an US Apache helicopter allegedly leaked by
Bradley Manning. The impact of this one video marked Manning and Assange
for state vengeance. Here were US
airmen murdering journalists and maiming children in a Baghdad street, clearly enjoying it and
describing their atrocity as "nice." Yet, in one vital sense, they
did not get away with it; we are witnesses now, and the rest is up to us

TOPICS

GUESTS

Chris Pyle, author of four books. His most recent is Getting Away with
Torture. In 1970, he disclosed the military’s spying on civilian politics
and worked for three congressional committees to end it, including Senator
Frank Church’s Select Committee on Intelligence. He teaches constitutional law
and civil liberties at MountHolyokeCollege.

LINKS

AsNSAdirector
General Keith Alexander blasts the leaks that exposed widespread surveillance
of Americans, we’re joined by Chris Pyle, a former military instructor who
exposed theCIAand Army’s monitoring of millions of
Americans in the 1970s. Pyle discovered the Army andCIAwere spying on millions of Americans
engaged in lawful political activity while he was in the Army working as an
instructor. His revelations prompted Senate hearings, including Senator Frank
Church’s Select Committee on Intelligence, ultimately leading to a series of
laws aimed at curbing government abuses. Now teaching constitutional law and
civil liberties at MountHolyokeCollege,
Pyle says theNSAis known for attacking its critics
instead of addressing the problems they expose.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in
its final form.

JUANGONZÁLEZ:We want to go on to the National Security Agency director, General
Keith Alexander, who testified before Congress Wednesday, a week after a
trove of secret documents about his agency’s widespread surveillance program
stunned the nation and sparked heated debate. During his testimony, Alexander
denied claims he has personal wiretapping abilities at the agency and insisted
phone data collection has helped prevent dozens of terrorist attacks. He
refused to publicly answer questions about how theNSAhad made the transition to collecting
phone records of Americans. Alexander also said he hoped for greater
transparency around the surveillance programs, but he argued some secrecy helps
the agency’s mission. He was also asked about the impact of theNSAleaks. This was his response.

GEN.KEITHALEXANDER:Great harm has already been done by
opening this up. And the consequence, I believe, is our security is
jeopardized. There is no doubt in my mind that we will lose capabilities as a
result of this and that not only the United States, but those allies that we
have helped, will no longer be as safe as they were two weeks ago. And so, I am
really concerned about that. I’m also concerned that, as we go forward, we now
know that some of this has been released. So what does it make sense to explain
to the American people so they have confidence that their government is doing
the right thing? Because I believe we are, and we have to show them that.

JUANGONZÁLEZ:The disclosure of the secretNSAsurveillance program was based on
information leaked by Edward Snowden, a formerCIAemployee who most recently worked
inside the NSA’s Hawaii
office for the private firm Booz Allen Hamilton. In an exclusive interview with
theSouth China Morning Post, Snowden said, quote, "I’m
neither traitor nor hero, I’m an American." He also said he intends to
stay in Hong Kong until he’s asked to leave, and he intends to fight any
extradition attempts by the U.S.
government. Snowden also told the paper, quote, "People who think I made a
mistake in picking [Hong Kong] as a location
misunderstand my intentions. I am not here to hide from justice; I am here to
reveal criminality."

AMYGOODMAN:Well, for more, we’re joined by Christopher Pyle, who first exposed
domestic spying in the 1970s here in the U.S. Pyle discovered theCIAwas spying on millions of Americans
engaged in lawful activity while he was in the Army and worked as an
instructor. After he left, he wrote about the Army’s vast and growing spy
operations. His article from 1971 began, quote, "For the past four years,
the U.S. Army has been closely watching civilian political activity within the United States."
Pyle’s story prompted Senate hearings, including Senator Frank Church’s Select
Committee on Intelligence. These ultimately led to a series of laws aimed at
curbing government abuse. Chris Pyle is the co-author ofMilitary
Surveillance of Civilian Politics,Getting
Away with TortureandThe
Constitution Under Siege. He now teaches constitutional law and
civil liberties at MountHolyokeCollege
and recently wrote apieceheadlined, "Edward Snowden and
the Real Issues." He joins us from Chicopee,
Massachusetts.

Washington, D.C. May 10,
2010. WhistleblowerBunnatine "Bunny" Greenhouse will speak on
"Ethics and the Whistleblower" in conjunction with artist Marcia
Annenberg's lecture and exhibition "News/Not News" at Boricua College
in New York City on Wednesday, May 19, 2010 at 6:00 pm EST.

Mrs. Greenhouse will speak about her work as a public servant, and her
commitment to preserving integrity, honesty and accountability in government
contracting. Mrs. Greenhouse stood alone
in opposing the approval of a highly improper multi-billion dollar no-bid
contract to Halliburton for the reconstruction of Iraqi Oil. In return for her
courage she was retaliated against and removed from her position as the
Procurement Executive, the highest-ranking civilian-contracting official at the
Army Corps of Engineers. Her case continues today.

Dispute over Whistleblower Access to Federal Court Intensifies

Washington, D.C.
September 3, 2009. As reported in a front-page story of today'sWashington Times,
internationally respected whistleblower, Bunnatine (Bunny) H. Greenhouse, has issued an appealto the U.S. Senate to pass strong
protections for all federal employees. Mrs. Greenhouse was the only major Bush
Administration executive to challenge the Halliburton "no bid" Iraq
reconstruction contracts.

"We
urge every American to read Bunny's letter and toTAKE ACTION! ," said Stephen M. Kohn, NWC
Executive Director. "This is not a Democrat or Republican
issue. This is not a partisian issue. This is an issue that goes to
the heart of accountability and oversight. In the House of
Representatives Democratic leader Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) joined with
his republican colleague Todd Platts (R-PA) to introduce an effective
whistleblower law that would give Bunny Greenhouse her day in court , The
Senate should follow this bi-partisian lead and ensure that the promises made
to whistleblowers during the 2008 election campaign are fulfilled."

Voice
of America
releases video on Bunny Greenhouse

"Bunny" might have a soft and cuddly side, but it's her
watchdog self that got her in trouble.

When Greenhouse blew the whistle on noncompetitive
multibillion-dollar contracts to Kellogg Brown & Root, then a Halliburton
subsidiary, for work in Iraq's
oil fields, she thought she was following her oath of office.

Washington, D.C. May 20, 2009. The NationalWhistleblowersCenter
today disclosed a new campaign of censorship and retaliation by the Army Corps
of Engineers directed against whistleblower Bunnatine (Bunny) H. Greenhouse.

Within hours of testifying in Congress, Ms. Greenhouse received an
email from the Army Corps Chief of Staff demanding pre-clearance of any
testimony Greenhouse may wish to present to Congress. Ironically,
Greenhouse's testimony was presented before the House Committee on Oversight
and Government Reform about legislation aimed at protecting whistleblowers from
just this kind of action.

Washington, D.C.
February 9, 2009. Bunnatine ("Bunny")
H. Greenhouse, the highest ranking procurement official to oppose
the no-bid, cost plus contracts to Halliburton for the reconstruction of
Iraq, weighed in on the need for Congress to include real whistlebower
protections as part of the stimulus-bailout bill (read her letter).

" I
urge you tocontact your Senatorsand
let them know that whistleblower protection is a critical part of the stimulus
package for protection of the public trust. I urge you tocontact your Representativesand tell them to hold strong -- and
refuse to cut whistleblower protections from the bill. Federal employees,
like me, who risk their careers to protect taxpayer money need to be
protected."

Soon afterPresident
Obamaappointed him
director of national intelligence in 2009,Dennis C.
Blaircalled for a
tally of the number of government officials or employees who had been
prosecuted for leaking national security secrets. He was dismayed by what he
found.

That scorecard “was pretty shocking to all of
us,” Mr. Blair said. So in a series of phone calls and meetings, he and Attorney
GeneralEric
H. Holder Jr.fashioned
a more aggressive strategy to punish anyone who leaked national security
information that endangered intelligence-gathering methods and sources.

“My background is in the Navy, and it is good
to hang an admiral once in a while as an example to the others,” said Mr.
Blair, who left the administration in 2010. “We were hoping to get somebody and
make people realize that there are consequences to this and it needed to stop.”

The Obama administration has done its
best to define those consequences, with an aggressive focus on leaks and
leakers that has led to more than twice as many prosecutions as there were in
all previous administrations combined. It also led toa significant legal victoryon Friday when a federal appeals court
accepted the Justice Department’s argument that the First Amendment does not
protect reporters from having to reveal the sources suspected of leaking
information to them.

In tracing the origins of this effort, present
and former government officials said the focus on leaks began at the
administration’s highest levels and was driven by pressure from the
intelligence agencies and members of Congress.

An unprecedented cascade of disclosures,
including hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic cables made public by
WikiLeaks, according to these officials, gave the search for leakers a growing
sense of urgency, while technological advances made the job of finding them
easier. And prosecutors — until recently — were given more latitude to comb
through journalists’ records to hunt for suspects.

The charges filed last monthagainst Edward J. Snowden,
the former National Security Agency contractor now holed up in a Moscow airport, are the
seventh leak-related prosecution brought by the Justice Department. And the
department’s next case may be aimed at just the kind of top-level target that
Mr. Blair said he had hoped for: James E. Cartwright, a retired general who was
vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until August 2011. General
Cartwright has been identified as a focus of an investigation into the
disclosure of classified information about American-led cyberattacks onIran’s nuclear program.

Supporters of the crackdown — even those with
qualms about seeking evidence from journalists — say a culture of leaking must
be reined in to protect covert sources and high-risk intelligence operations
and reassure allies that it is safe to share intelligence.

“Somebody finally said this has got to stop,”
said John D. Negroponte, a former diplomat and director of national
intelligence under George W. Bush. “Maybe if there are more prosecutions, it
will.”

But critics argue that the Cartwright case,
and now the appeals court ruling, show how the antileak campaign has gone too
far, producing a chilling effect on news gathering without deterring leakers.
Mr. Snowden has said he was inspired by the deeds of Pfc. Bradley Manning, who
is facing a court-martial after divulging the diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks.

“I think it has gotten away from them,” said
Morton H. Halperin, who served in national security or diplomatic positions in
three previous administrations. “If the president doesn’t fix this, I think his
claim that he understands the importance of balancing the First Amendment
against claims of national security will lack any credibility.”

Implicitly at least, Mr. Holder seemed to
acknowledge some of the criticism this month when herestored and bolsteredlongstandingJustice
Department restraintson
seeking evidence from journalists. He said those restrictions “will help ensure
the proper balance is struck when pursuing investigations into unauthorized
disclosures.”

Mr. Holder’s move came in response to a
torrent of criticism after the revelations this spring that prosecutors had
secretly subpoenaed the phone logs for more than 20 phone lines of The
Associated Press in one leak inquiry and two days of phone logs of a Fox News
reporter, James Rosen, in another investigation aimed at a State Department
adviser, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim. Prosecutors also obtained a court-ordered search
warrant for Mr. Rosen’s e-mails by identifying him as a criminal co-conspirator
of Mr. Kim’s.

But Mr. Holder’s conciliatory message was
seemingly undermined by the Justice Department’s success in overturning a lower
court’s ruling that a reporter for The New York Times, James Risen, had a First
Amendment right to refuse to reveal his sources in the trial of a former C.I.A.
analyst, Jeffrey Sterling. Mr. Sterling was charged in 2010 with disclosing
classified information to Mr. Risen about a covert operation to deceive Iranian
scientists described in Mr. Risen’s 2006 book, “State of War.”

Mr. Risen has previously vowed to go to jail
to protect his sources. On Saturday he said in a statement, “I remain as
resolved as ever to continue fighting.”

The targeting of General Cartwright in the
investigation of disclosures about cyberattacks on Iran also represents an escalation
of effort. If charged, he would be by far the most senior official ever to face
criminal prosecution for divulging information to the news media. Other
high-ranking officials have faced minor criminal charges for mishandling
information, but only low-to-mid-level analysts, contract workers and technicians
have been indicted on charges of releasing secrets to journalists.

The closest parallel would be the case against
I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney who
was convicted in 2007 of lying to a federal grand jury and to F.B.I. agents
investigating the unmasking of a covert C.I.A. operative to a newspaper
columnist.

“The Cartwright case stands alone,” said
Steven Aftergood, who studies government secrecy for the nonprofit Federation
of American Scientists. “It is a sign that the administration is not backing
off its antileak crusade. It is still going full tilt.”

General Cartwright has not commented on the
reports that he is being investigated, but his lawyer, Gregory B. Craig, has
said any suggestion that his client betrayed his country is “preposterous.”

President Bush also faced damaging leaks
during his tenure. But his Justice Department prosecuted only one official
under the Espionage Act for disclosing national security secrets, a Pentagon
analyst first investigated in 2004 and convicted in 2006. As a conservative,
President Bush would have faced a greater public backlash had he sought to
imprison leakers, said Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior scholar with the Hudson
Institute, a conservative-leaning research organization.

Mr. Bush “was not willing to spend the
political capital,” Mr. Schoenfeld said. “This president is very hawkish on
this.”

So far, the Obama administration has won two
felony convictions for unauthorized disclosure of national security secrets.
Private Manning has also pleaded guilty to 10 offenses and is now being tried
in military court on others. A fourth felony prosecution crumbled, producing a
minor misdemeanor conviction, and Mr. Holder has privately said he regrets
pursuing it.

In June,Mr. Holder saidhis department’s record
number of leak prosecutions was a logical legal response to an increase in both
the number and seriousness of leaks. But in interviews, former prosecutors and
other administration and Congressional officials offered a different
perspective.

Though the Justice Department issued no
explicit directive to pursue leakers more vigorously, according to these
officials, the climate in which leaks were judged changed markedly as a new
team of national security officials joined the Obama administration and quickly
ran head-on into what it saw as distressing lapses in controlling state secrets.

“There was a lot of pressure to use every
possible investigative tool,” said one senior former prosecutor who spoke on
the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak for the
Justice Department.

According to Mr. Blair, the effort got under
way after Fox News reported in June 2009 that American intelligence had gleaned
word from within North Korea
of plans for an imminent nuclear test — a disclosure that eventually led to the
indictment of Mr. Kim. The report infuriated the Central Intelligence Agency
not only because it indicated that the United States was privy to the
private discussions of North Korean leaders, but also because it was broadcast
mere hours after a classified report with that information had been distributed
to intelligence officials.

In subsequent meetings and phone calls, Mr.
Blair said, he and Mr. Holder, who declined a request for an interview, agreed
that leaks were flourishing partly because the government was too passive in
addressing them. Of 153 referrals to the Justice Department of national
security leaks during President Bush’s second term, only 24 had led to F.B.I.
investigations. In half of those cases, investigators had identified suspects,
but none of them had faced charges, although two investigations were in an
advanced stage and ultimately produced indictments in 2010.

Mr. Holder’s “attitude, the same as mine, was
to speed up the process and make it more effective,” Mr. Blair said. “So, yes,
that would mean more aggressive prosecution.”

The Justice Department imposed a tight
deadline to decide whether to open criminal inquiries into leaks, shortening to
just three weeks a review process that had often dragged on for months. Leaks
considered unworthy of prosecution were marked for administrative inquiries. Underscoring
the administration’s determination, Robert M. Bryant, Mr. Blair’s national
counterintelligence executive, was put in charge of stanching leaks.

The White House has kept a careful distance
from the Justice Department prosecutions, but President Obama seemed unwavering
in his support for them. When government transparency advocates told him in
March 2011 that chasing whistle-blowers was sullying his record, the president
disagreed, saying some disclosures had been very damaging to national security.

And members of Congress continuously clamored for a tougher approach. At a closed
hearing in December 2009, members of the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, led by Dianne Feinstein,
Democrat of California, scolded Mr. Holder, Mr. Blair and the F.B.I. director,
Robert S. Mueller, saying they had not adequately protected national security
secrets.

“A tipping point was reached in 2009,” said one knowledgeable Senate
aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not an official
spokesman. “There was an official change of policy.”

Mr. Blair said, “We had to do 50 push-ups and
promise to do better.”

Past overreaching notwithstanding, the Cartwright investigation suggests that
zeal has not waned.

The inquiry was prompted by a detailed account
of a series of United States- and Israeli-led cyberattacks on Iran’s nuclear
program, ina June 2012 articlein The New York Times and ina
bookpublished days
later, both by David E. Sanger, a Times reporter. Part of the operation, called
Olympic Games, was revealed two years earlier because of a programming error,
but much of it remained highly classified, setting off an aggressive search for
the source or sources of Mr. Sanger’s information.

Lucy A. Dalglish, a media lawyer and the dean
of journalism at the University
of Maryland, says that
case and others carry a strong message.

“They are not going to give up on national
security investigations, and they are still going to go after reporters’
information if they think they need to,” she said.

Ashley Southall
contributed reporting.

A
version of this article appeared in print on July 21, 2013, on pageA1of
theNew York editionwith the headline: Math Behind Leak
Crackdown: 153 Cases, 4 Years, 0 Indictments.

Obama's Plan to Crack Down on Whistleblowers Leaked

Washington - In an initiative aimed at
rooting out future leakers and other security violators, President Barack Obama
has ordered federal employees to report suspicious actions of their colleagues
based on behavioral profiling techniques that are not scientifically proven to
work, according to experts and government documents.

The
techniques are a key pillar of the Insider
Threat Program, an unprecedented government-wide crackdown under which
millions of federal bureaucrats and contractors must watch out for “high-risk
persons or behaviors” among co-workers. Those who fail to report them could
face penalties, including criminal charges.

Obama
mandated the program in an October 2011 executive order after Army Pfc. Bradley
Manning downloaded hundreds of thousands of documents from a classified
computer network and gave them to WikiLeaks, the anti-government secrecy group.
The order covers virtually every federal department and agency, including the
Peace Corps, the Department of Education and others not directly involved in
national security.

Under
the program, which is being implemented with little public attention, security
investigations can be launched when government employees showing “indicators of
insider threat behavior” are reported by co-workers, according to previously
undisclosed administration documents obtained by McClatchy. Investigations also
can be triggered when “suspicious user behavior” is detected by computer
network monitoring and reported to “insider threat personnel.”

Federal
employees and contractors are asked to pay particular attention to the
lifestyles, attitudes and behaviors – like financial troubles, odd working
hours or unexplained travel – of co-workers as a way to predict whether they
might do “harm to the United
States.” Managers of special insider threat
offices will have “regular, timely, and, if possible, electronic, access” to
employees’ personnel, payroll, disciplinary and “personal contact” files, as
well as records of their use of classified and unclassified computer networks,
polygraph results, travel reports and financial disclosure forms.

Over
the years, numerous studies of public and private workers who’ve been caught
spying, leaking classified information, stealing corporate secrets or engaging
in sabotage have identified psychological
profiles that could offer clues to possible threats. Administration
officials want government workers trained to look for such indicators and
report them so the next violation can be stopped before it happens.

“In
past espionage cases, we find people saw things that may have helped identify a
spy, but never reported it,” said Gene Barlow, a spokesman for the Office of
the National Counterintelligence Executive, which oversees government efforts
to detect threats like spies and computer hackers and is helping implement the
Insider Threat Program. “That is why the awareness effort of the program is to
teach people not only what types of activity to report, but how to report it
and why it is so important to report it.”

But even the government’s top
scientific advisers have questioned these techniques. Those experts say that
trying to predict future acts through behavioral monitoring is unproven and
could result in illegal ethnic and racial profiling and privacy violations.

“There
is no consensus in the relevant scientific community nor on the committee
regarding whether any behavioral surveillance or physiological monitoring
techniques are ready for use at all,” concluded a 2008 National Research
Council report on detecting terrorists.

“Doing
something similar about predicting future leakers seems even more speculative,”
Stephen Fienberg, a professor of statistics and social science at CarnegieMellonUniversity in Pittsburgh and a member of the committee that
wrote the report, told McClatchy.

The
emphasis on individual lifestyles, attitudes and behaviors comes at a time when
growing numbers of Americans must submit to extensive background checks,
polygraph tests and security investigations to be hired or to keep government
or federal contracting jobs. The U.S. government is one of the
world’s largest employers, overseeing an ever-expanding ocean of information.

While
the Insider Threat Program mandates that the nearly 5 million federal workers
and contractors with clearances undergo training in recognizing suspicious
behavior indicators, it allows individual departments and agencies to extend
the requirement to their entire workforces, something the Army already has
done.

Training
should address “current and potential threats in the work and personal
environment” and focus on “the importance of detecting potential insider
threats by cleared employees and reporting suspected activity to insider threat
personnel and other designated officials,” says one of the documents obtained
by McClatchy.

The
White House, the Justice Department, the Peace Corps and the departments of Health
and Human Services, Homeland Security and Education refused to answer questions
about the program’s implementation. Instead, they issued virtually identical
email statements directing inquiries to the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence, declined to comment or didn’t respond.

Caitlin
Hayden, a spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council, said in
her statement that the Insider Threat Program includes extra safeguards for
“civil rights, civil liberties and privacy,” but she didn’t elaborate.
Manning’s leaks to WikiLeaks, she added, showed that at the time protections of
classified materials were “inadequate and put our nation’s security at risk.”

Even
so, the new effort failed to prevent former National Security Agency contractor
Edward Snowden from taking top-secret documents detailing the agency’s domestic
and international communications monitoring programs and leaking them to The
Guardian and The Washington Post newspapers.

The
initiative goes beyond classified information leaks. It includes as insider
threats “damage to the United
States through espionage, terrorism, unauthorized
disclosure of national security information or through the loss or degradation
of departmental resources or capabilities,” according to a document setting
“Minimum Standards for Executive Branch Insider Threat Programs.”

McClatchy
obtained a copy of the document, which was produced by an Insider Threat Task
Force that was set up under Obama’s order and is headed by Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper and Attorney General Eric Holder. McClatchy also
obtained the group’s final policy guidance. The White House, the Justice
Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined
requests for both documents, neither of which is classified.

Although
agencies and departments are still setting up their programs, some employees
already are being urged to watch co-workers for “indicators” that include
stress, divorce and financial problems.

When
asked about the ineffectiveness of behavior profiling, Barlow said the policy
“does not mandate” that employees report behavior indicators.

“It
simply educates employees about basic activities or behavior that might suggest
a person is up to improper activity,” he said.

“These
do not require special talents. If you see someone reading classified documents
they should not be reading, especially if this happens multiple times and the
person appears nervous that you saw him, that is activity that is suspicious
and should be reported,” Barlow said. “The insider threat team then looks at
the surrounding facts and draws the conclusions about the activity.”

Departments
and agencies, however, are given leeway to go beyond the White House’s basic
requirements, prompting the Defense Department in its strategy to mandate that
workers with clearances “must recognize the potential harm caused by unauthorized
disclosures and be aware of the penalties they could face.” It equates
unauthorized disclosures of classified information to “aiding the enemies of
the United States.”

All
departments and agencies involved in the program must closely track their employees’
online activities. The information gathered by monitoring, the administration
documents say, “could be used against them in criminal, security, or
administrative proceedings.” Experts who research such efforts say suspicious
behaviors include accessing information that someone doesn’t need or isn’t
authorized to see or downloading materials onto removable storage devices like
thumb drives when such devices are restricted or prohibited.

“If
you normally print 20 documents a week, well, what happens if the next week or
the following week you have to print 50 documents or 100 documents? That could
be at variance from your normal activity that could be identified and might be
investigated,” said Randy Trzeciak, acting manager of the ComputerEmergencyResponseTeamInsiderThreatCenter
at CarnegieMellonUniversity’s
Software Engineering Institute.

“We’ve
come up with patterns that we believe organizations might be able to consider
when determining when someone might be progressing down the path to harm the
organization,” said Trzeciak, whose organization has analyzed more than 800
cases and works with the government and private sector on cyber security.

But
research and other programs that rely on profiling show it remains unproven,
could make employees more resistant to reporting violations and might lead to
spurious allegations.

The
Pentagon, U.S.
intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security have spent tens
of millions of dollars on an array of research projects. Yet after several
decades, they still haven’t developed a list of behaviors they can use to
definitively identify the tiny fraction of workers who might some day violate
national security laws.

“We
are back to the needle-in-a-haystack problem,” said Fienberg, the Carnegie
Mellon professor.

“We
have not found any silver bullets,” said Deanna Caputo, principal behavioral
psychologist at MITRE Corp., a nonprofit company working on insider threat
efforts for U.S.
defense, intelligence and law enforcement agencies. “We don’t have actually any
really good profiles or pictures of a bad guy, a good guy gone bad or even the
bad guy walking in to do bad things from the very beginning.”

Different
agencies and departments have different lists of behavior indicators. Most have
adopted the traditional red flags for espionage. They include financial stress,
disregard for security practices, unexplained foreign travel, unusual work
hours and unexplained or sudden wealth.

But
agencies and their consultants have added their own indicators.

For
instance, an FBI insider threat detection guide warns private security
personnel and managers to watch for “a desire to help the ‘underdog’ or a
particular cause,” a “James Bond Wannabe” and a “divided loyalty: allegiance to
another person or company or to a country besides the United States.”

A
report by the Deloitte consulting firm identifies “several key trends that are
making all organizations particularly susceptible to insider threat today.”
These trends include an increasingly disgruntled, post-Great Recession
workforce and the entry of younger, “Gen Y” employees who were “raised on the
Internet” and are “highly involved in social networking.”

Some
government programs that have embraced behavioral indicators have been
condemned as failures. Perhaps the most heavily criticized is the
Transportation Security Administration’s Screening of Passengers by Observation
Techniques, or SPOT, program.

The
program, which has cost $878 million and employs 2,800 people, uses “behavior
detection officers” to identify potential terrorists by scrutinizing airline
passengers for signs of “stress, fear or deception.”

DHS’
inspector general excoriated the program, saying in a May 2013 report, “TSA
cannot ensure that passengers at United States airports are screened
objectively, show that the program is cost-effective or reasonably justify the
program’s expansion.”

Interviews
and internal complaints obtained by The New York Times quoted TSA officers as
saying SPOT has led to ethnic and racial profiling by emphasizing certain
profiles. They include Middle Easterners, Hispanics traveling to Miami and
African-Americans wearing baseball caps backward.

“Employees
in the field are not averse to reporting genuine security infractions. In fact,
under appropriate conditions they are quite willing to act as eyes and ears for
the government,” said a 2005 study by the Pentagon’s DefensePersonnelSecurityResearchCenter. “They are simply
confused about precisely what is important enough to report. Many government
workers anguish over reporting gray-area behaviors.”

Even
so, the Pentagon is forging ahead with training Defense Department and
contractor managers and security officials to set up insider threat offices,
with one company emphasizing how its course is designed for novices.

“The
Establishing an Insider Threat Program for Your Organization Course will take
no more than 90 minutes to complete,” says the proposal.

Officials
with the Army, the only government department contacted by McClatchy that
agreed to discuss the issue, acknowledged that identifying potential insider
threats is more complicated than relying on a list of behaviors.

“What
we really point out is if you’re in doubt, report, because that’s what the
investigative personnel are there to do, is to get the bottom of ‘is this just
noise or is this something that is really going on?’” said Larry Gillis, a
senior Army counterintelligence and security official.

The
Army implemented a tough program a year before Obama’s executive order after
Maj. Nidal Hasan, a U.S.-born Muslim, allegedly killed 13 people in a 2009
rampage at Fort Hood, Texas. Hasan, who has not gone on trial, has
said he was defending the Afghan Taliban.

Gillis
said the Army didn’t want a program that would “get people to snitch on each
other,” nor did it want to encourage stereotyping.

“We
don’t have the luxury to make up reasons to throw soldiers out,” Gillis said.
“It’s a big deal to remove a soldier from service over some minor issue. We
don’t want to ruin a career over some false accusation.”

But
some current and former U.S.
officials and experts worry that Obama’s Insider Threat Program could lead to
false or retaliatory accusations across the entire government, in part because
security officials are granted access to information outside their usual
purview.

These
current and former U.S.
officials and experts also ridiculed as overly zealous and simplistic the idea
of using reports of suspicious behavior to predict potential insider threats.
It takes years for professional spy-hunters to learn their craft, and relying
on the observations of inexperienced people could lead to baseless and
discriminatory investigations, they said.

“Anyone
is an amateur looking at behavior here,” said Thomas Fingar, a former State
Department intelligence chief who chaired the National Intelligence Council,
which prepares top-secret intelligence analyses for the president, from 2005 to
2008.

Co-workers,
Fingar said, should “be attentive” to colleagues’ personal problems in order to
refer them to counseling, not to report them as potential security violators.
“It’s simply because they are colleagues, fellow human beings,” he said.

Eric
Feldman, a former inspector general of the National Reconnaissance Office, the
super-secret agency that oversees U.S. spy satellites, expressed
concern that relying on workers to report colleagues’ suspicious behaviors to
security officials could create “a repressive kind of culture.”

“The
answer to it is not to have a Stasi-like response,” said Feldman, referring to
the feared secret police of communist East Germany. “You’ve removed that
firewall between employees seeking help and the threat that any employee who
seeks help could be immediately retaliated against by this insider threat
office.”

CORRECTION: A story about the Obama administration's Insider
Threat Program gave the wrong name and title for Deanna Caputo, the principal
behavioral psychologist at MITRE Corp.